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Toronto should not return to Miller-ville

The troubled Ford administration has at least addressed real city issues.

Given a choice between Rob Ford and David Miller, Rondi Adamson would opt for Ford every time. (July 31, 2009) (Richard Lautens / Toronto Star) | Order this photo

By Rondi Adamson

Fri., June 7, 2013

It might come as a surprise to some Torontonians that many of us who voted for Rob Ford in 2010 did not do so because we were impressed with his PR prowess. We voted for him because we feared a vote for George Smitherman would mean a continuation of life in Miller-ville.

The received wisdom about Mayor Ford is that those who voted for him are all angry, car-worshipping, Tim Hortons-frequenting suburbanites who see those who live in Toronto as “them” and who believe that “them” are out to get their guy. Another assertion is that regardless of the election, they reflexively vote conservative.

I live in Toronto — downtown — and have been known to drink a Starbucks latte or 50. I don’t own a car. In a recent byelection I supported the animal rights candidate in my riding. In short, I don’t qualify for membership in “Ford Nation” and yet, in the 2010 municipal election, I voted for Rob Ford.

I voted for him because after two terms of a disastrous though media-friendly mayor, I did not relish the idea of another summer of strikes, and pungent, inconveniencing ones at that; another four years of being held hostage by unions; another four years of rent-seeking and overspending; another four years of a mayor who was antagonistic to Billy Bishop Airport, despite the undeniable benefits it brings to the city; another four years of having a mayor who prioritized bike lanes over concerns about the reasonable flow of car traffic. (For the record, I’m not against bike lanes; I’m against bike lanes on streets like Jarvis.)

Since his election, the mayor has had some successes: privatizing garbage collection west of Yonge; scrapping the car registration tax; rerouting the bike lane on Jarvis back to traffic. This week it was announced that Toronto finished 2012 with a surplus of $248 million. And much of this has been accomplished with a less-than-co-operative city council, in part made up of people seeking to further their chances in future elections; in part made of those still apoplectic — two and a half years in — that Ford won a mandate.

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What I like about Ford — and this is something David Miller never understood — is that he understands that mandate. The job of the mayor is to deal with infrastructure and services and make the city run as efficiently as possible. The job of the mayor is not, say, to mandate ethnic food carts, as Miller saw fit to do. And I write this as someone who would prefer a falafel over a vegetarian hotdog any day.

I wish Mayor Ford were handling the current drama with aplomb. But were an election held today, with the allegations against him unproven, I would likely vote for him again. I say “likely” because in a fictional election, I don’t know the fictional opponents. Were we talking about Olivia Chow, I would vote for Ford, because I think Chow-town would be Miller-ville, The Sequel.

Since 2010, a common cry from some of my anti-Ford friends has been, “It’s not my Toronto, anymore!” Sure it is. When Miller was mayor I never thought it wasn’t “my Toronto.” I just thought it was my Toronto run by a grandstanding incompetent.

And this is what those who want Ford gone have never understood: their inability to admit that Miller was a disaster and that Smitherman or Chow would be more of the same. Field a better candidate already and some of us would leave Ford Nation.

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